Quick link: Campaign news and the contest for KRudd’s seat

The Poll Bludger has posted a useful wrap of some recent developments which is worth a read.

Among the links cited, there’s one to the selection of Rebecca Docherty as the LNP candidate for Kevin Rudd’s seat of Griffith:

The Liberal National Party has come up with an odd arrangement whereby its newly preselected candidate for Kevin Rudd’s seat of Griffith, Rebecca Docherty – herself a substitute for dumped former Liberal Democratic Party figure John Humphreys – will make way for an unspecified “high-profile” candidate should Rudd have a late change of heart about remaining in politics.

Kevin Rudd will be campaigning in his seat today, though not taking questions from the media pack. There’s more on Docherty here.

There are persistent rumours around town that former Howard minister, Mal Brough, is the putative “celebrity candidate”. Griffith is Labor’s safest seat in Queensland, but a lot of that is Kevin Rudd’s personal vote.

So why doesn’t he? What about Longman? One would imagine he had as much to offer as Wyatt Roy or Michael Palmer. Even in Griffith it seems unfair that Rebecca Docherty should have to bow out if the seat suddenly looks winnable. I’m amazed that there are young people willing to run for the LNP or Libs or Nationals if older and more powerful aspirants so obviously don’t want to do the hard yards of pre-selection and campaigning in marginal seats.

You’ve already answered my question, of course. He lacks guts. Lazy too? Or is he burnt out after all that huffing and puffing over the Intervention? I sensed him then to be an officious, self-important martinet type who was lucky enough to get Howard’s attention just when he was looking around for a new and fresh ‘initiative’ to brighten up his re-election hopes.

The chances of anyone taking down Rudd in this election in his own seat would surely be nil. Apart from the fact that he is personally popular there (as gathered from a NSW perspective, very popular in fact, unless you were some dyed-in-the-wool anti-Laborite yearning for the return of Bjelke-Pewtersen and all he stood for i) t he has quite a large margin, I gather. Add to that the size of the sympathy vote Rudd is certain to get this time round, and he would have to be unbeatable. Brough surely would not want to know about it. If he stood it would be 2 wipe-outs in a row for him. He doesn’t strike me as a resiliant, or for that matter, sufficiently ambitious type to bear it again.

That’s right, Paul. As Kim said, Griffith is currently Labor’s safest seat in Queensland. A lot of that is KRudd’s personal vote – it takes in areas that are rapidly gentrifying, and probably would be much more marginal without him as incumbent.

The Brough speculation seems to have been largely to do with Liberal doubt about whether Rudd would recontest, which in turn seems to have been driven by what journos were making of what he and Therese Rein were writing on Twitter!

I am utterly disgusted at the way Kevin Rudd is sucking the oxygen out of Labor’s campaign. He’s far too smart not to know exactly what he’s doing/ I hope he gets a job with the UN and quickly. His idea of party solidarity is apalling. If I lived in his seat, after today I would not vote for him. Too disgusted to contemplate politics at the moment. Instead, intend to settle down and watch Christopher Plummer in the Fall of the Roman Empire. And apt metaphor for the shocking state of the personal politics obvious in this campaign.

Visiting a school in his electorate? Not saying anything at all about being deposed? Refusing to feed the media’s obsessions by not answering questions? Staying in the party, and in the parliament to make them look unified, rather than resign and open the party up to criticisms of disunity?

Hmm, couldn’t that fairly be described as “campaigning in his own seat, and determinedly refusing to say anything remotely controversial, despite being leg-humped by 30 journos gagging for something to throw at Gillard”, Paul?